My Motorola Cell Phone Sucks

Here are just a few reasons why my Motorola i760 cell phone sucks.

1. About 90% of the time when I plug the phone into its charger, the phone turns off by itself in about an hour, for no good reason.

2. It makes an awful buzzing/clicking interference noise in the speakers of any nearby stereo, especially when it’s ringing, about to ring, or in use. This is actually true of all GSM phones though, apparently:

Quoting wikipedia:

A nearby GSM handset is usually the source of the "dit dit dit, dit dit dit, dit dit dit" signal that can be heard from time to time on home stereo systems, televisions, computers, and personal music devices. When these audio devices are in the near field of the GSM handset, the radio signal is strong enough that the solid state amplifiers in the audio chain function as a detector. The clicking noise itself represents the power bursts that carry the TDMA signal. These signals have been known to interfere with other electronic devices, such as car stereos and portable audio players.

3. Its "Recent Calls" feature doesn’t work properly. This is true of all Motorola phones I’ve used (3 different ones). Let’s say you’ve recently received (but missed) the following 5 calls:

A "Recent Calls" list would display exactly that, though probably with the times on a separate screen (which is dumb). But here’s what the phone actually displays:

3:20 PM - Mom
3:45 PM - Wife
4:00 PM - Client Bob

So you have no idea that your maniacal Client Bob actually called you 3 times in the past hour. The fact is, this feature is a "Recent Callers" list, not a "Recent Calls" list. The feature actually implemented is much less useful, and it’s made even worse by the fact that it’s incorrectly titled.

4. The address book only lets you enter 20 characters in the "Name" field. 20 characters isn’t even enough for many people’s first and last names; forget about including an extra word or two to indicate who the person is (business name? location? something to indicate their affiliation with you?) -- that would just be too darn useful. It says I currently have 127 slots in use and 473 free, so it clearly has enough memory to spare a few extra letters on each entry.

5. The alarm feature (under "Datebook") is totally lame. It won’t turn the phone on to sound the alarm, which means you can’t turn the phone off if you want to use the alarm (for, say, an ALARM clock in the morning), which means someone can call you in the middle of the night and wake you up. This could be fixed by setting the phone to "silent" overnight, except for another boneheaded feature: the alarm won’t go off if the phone is set to silent.

6. Miscellaneous inconsistencies, for example: if you go to the messages screen and highlight "voice mail", you can’t hit the "call" button to call it; you have to hit the "OK" button. But if you highlight the "voice mail" item in the "Recent Calls" list, the opposite is true: "OK" doesn’t call it, but the "call" button does.

Update: more reasons to hate this friggin’ phone:

7. OK, so I can send an IM to my phone from AIM by using the phone number (starting with "+1") as the screenname. That’s cool. And I can send an email to my phone by sending it to phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com -- cool, and I can even attach photos -- really cool! But can I set one of my own photos as the wallpaper (background image) on the phone? No, of course not! Only "official" images (read: ones that you purchase from Sprint/Nextel) can be used as wallpaper. Just another example of the phone networks artificially limiting the phone hardware’s capabilities to extract more money out of us. Friggin’ crooks.

Comments:

My Motorola phone sucks too. I’m not even one of those cell phone power users that uses it to organize their lives. I only ask for basic functionality - make and receive calls, charge properly, stay charged for more than 17 minutes, and don’t randomly start falling apart after 6 months. Out of those demands, my phone is only reasonably good at the first one (you know, when it’s actually charged and not falling apart). Getting a new battery would probably help, but my contract is up in a couple months though so I’m probably just going to get a new phone soon.

By the way, I saw The Devil and God... in your play list here. I know both you and I were eagerly anticipating that album. Thoughts?

I liked the album right away, and it’s growing on me. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near the caliber of Deja Entendu, and perhaps not even of Your Favorite Weapon -- and it’s certainly not as catchy as YFW.

From the lyrics, which mirror the album title pretty much throughout the album, it’s clear that Jesse has found or is finding Jesus, which makes it in some ways more interesting than the previous 2 albums. But musically I think it’s just not quite on the same level.

The other thing is that the Fight Off Your Demons "leaked LP3 demos" were SO good. After hearing them, I was hoping that some of them would wind up on the album -- I would have loved it if every single one of those songs did. But as it turned out, only one of them did, and they changed it from acoustic to not, and I think I prefer the acoustic version. The lack of these demo tracks on the final album wouldn’t be so bad because hey, I still have the demo tracks to listen to, right? Except the audio quality on them is complete crap, so much so that it’s annoying to listen to them.

So all in all, I’m excited and grateful to have a new Brand New album, and I like it, but I’m also somewhat disappointed.

Honestly, I still haven’t listened to the demos extensively. It was a struggle not to during that looong wait for the next album and if I had known that they weren’t going to make the cut then I would have given in (I didn’t want to ruin the final product). Now I’m saving them for three years down the road when we’re again waiting endlessly for their next album with zero updates from the band. Haha.

Personally, I think this is my least favorite record of theirs. I now find myself skipping through about half the songs regularly while I almost always listen through YFW and Deja from beginning to end. On the other hand, Millstone, Jesus Christ, Limousine, Luca, and Archers are all just as good if not better than the stuff on Deja for me.

Unfortunately from beginning to end, Deja Entendu is about as close to a perfect album as you can get (in my opinion) so I knew I was going to be at least somewhat disappointed initially. Then it grew on me and now I’m at the point where I find that it’s not having as much staying power as I thought it would. Although who knows, maybe it’ll be one of those things where I’ll slap it in a few months from now and it’ll all start clicking.

Anyway, I guess I agree with your sentiments on the album at this point. Sorry about hijacking your thread! If I knew I had this much to say, I probably would’ve just started my own post. Back on topic now - Motorola still sucks!

On the other hand, Millstone, Jesus Christ, Limousine, Luca, and Archers are all just as good if not better than the stuff on Deja for me.
...
Unfortunately from beginning to end, Deja Entendu is about as close to a perfect album as you can get (in my opinion) so I knew I was going to be at least somewhat disappointed initially.

Yes, exactly. I guess I misspoke when I said that the new album doesn’t reach the level of Deja Entendu; what I meant was that while it does reach that level in a few shining places, it’s not consistently that good. As you mentioned, that’s what is so remarkable about DE: it’s amazing throughout. It’s like Clarity and Futures in that regard: it’s nearly unbelievable how close to perfection it is.

I exchanged several e-mails with Motorola’s tech support regarding an issue I had with my MOTORIZR Z3. I kept getting a "Picture Capture Error" or "System Error" whenever I tried entering the multimedia or camera section of the phone.
Tech support refused to help me, saying that my phone was manufactured for Singapore. (Who gives a fudge?!It’s a Motorola phone made by Motorola!)
No advice, no tech support. I complained to several departments about this. Got nowhere. Finally found a link on an Indonesian Motorola site to flash my phone. Phone menus are sluggish now. I’ll never buy another Motorola product for as long as I live. I won’t recommend this company’s products to anyone. Motorola is a company of white collared thieves.

The phone I hate the most is my stupid piece of crap instinct S30 for one the texting is IMPOSSIBLE with the touch screen instead of hitting the space bar you will hit the "c" or the "?" and then type two words (ex: heycdude) and then the red line comes up (spell check) so when you try to click after the "c" to backspace it, you get the four closest words (don’t even ask) so you have to erase the "c" and the word after it and THEN hit space and retype the word over which is especially annoying when you type a 400 letter long word and have to erase the whole [oops] thing, ALSO the second problem with the texting is that when you type in a letter (or try to) you get the letter next to it and your text ends up looking like this "si didw wjsta uo" AKA "so dude whats up". Now that that’s over lets move on to the picture taking, if you try to take a picture without your SD mini card inserted you will get a message "Please insert memory card." which is EXTREMELY annoying when you find the perfect picture like when a UFO lands right in front of you. Now onto the youtube video watching...when you try to watch a youtube video you end up having to wait for it to give you an error message about 3 times and then about on the fourth try the video will load oh yeah THERE’S MORE you can’t go to a certain part in a video like lets say there is a ten minute video and your favorite part is around the 8 minute mark, after you finally get the video to work you can’t fast forward it to the part that you like NO, you have to WAIT for it to finally get to that part and it is so [oops] annoying when your at the 7 and a-half minute mark and you hit the back button oh boy does that piss me off so much. And one more thing, the web browser SUCKS when you try to zoom in on a picture on google images its like looking at an NES game aka the pixels get 40 million times bigger so the quality is about 20p and the internet will freeze on you, the screens brightness will go to full for about 10 seconds then it will go black and the phone will restart if you are on the browser for too long and half the sites don’t even load in the correct format and it looks like [oops]. ONE last thing is that when you are doing something like a web page loading and get a call you have to slide a bar thing up and it will freeze in the neutral position and there is NOTHING you can do, you have to wait for like 10 seconds and you can hear the other person talk but they cant here you until the bar finally slides up by itself. So DO NOT buy this phone unless you will ONLY be making calls with it.

I’m glad I found your post! I too have experienced the depth of suck at Motorola.

I got a free phone from them. It’s directing all of my calls into voicemail and the home button doesn’t work. It’s a Cliq XT and, man, I thought I got lucky when I got one for free.

Had I known what a cluserf%^k it would be to get the thing replaced or repaired, I would have told them to keep the darn phone or given it to my worst enemy.

It took me 30 minutes to get an RMA number so that I can mail the phone in for repairs. I have no choice as that’s the only option they gave me to resolve the problem. Since the phone is free, my mobile carrier won’t replace it either. This sucks as does Motorola:
Motorola Sucks, part 1

Attrix dies will not recharge will not even turn on. Service no help offered to fix for 110.00, insane no more motorola. Imm using a 5year iphone till i can upgrade. This is my second bad experience with motorola